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A comment on The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers. Parent comment

Re:The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers by aninhumer on Tuesday December 02, 2014 @09:06AM (#8687100)
>there are tonal languages, after all!

I believe most (if not all) natural tonal languages use relative pitch, not absolute, so you wouldn't need perfect pitch to understand them.

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Re:The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers by jtheory on Tuesday December 02, 2014 @08:24PM (#8691301)
Huh; quite right. I've had it in my head for several years that Thai, at least, was tonal based on absolute pitch; but it looks like that's wrong.

I did turn up that a much larger percentage of people have perfect pitch in populations that speak tonal languages.

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